How critical are the Undersea Cables?

How critical are the Undersea Cables?

OK, I think I need to take this up a little bit as well. Let's look into what happened over the last few days. I think up to now we ended up with five cables cut in the Middle East. So, there are a lot of theories who was actually damaging those cables. The best one comes from WSJ J

But there were a few pretty remarkable things: One is a statement I found in article about these cables. It is from Stephan Beckert of TeleGeography:

He said there are approximately 50 cable cuts a year, 65 percent of which are due to fishing trawlers dragging heavy nets and 18 percent of which are due to ships' anchors. "They don't even track terrorism," he said. "Cable cuts are a routine part of the business."

So, it is even a question whether this could not have been really business as usual and just the press and the bloggers taking it up.

The second thing was that it does not seem to me that any of the Critical Infrastructure bodies I know of got really nervous. How far would a critical infrastructure be hit if a region or a country would have been cut off the Internet? Well, for water, power etc. it would probably not be a real problem. What about the rest? In a lot of countries the banks are part of the critical infrastructure as they are critical to public wealth. If they lose international connectivity, this would be a serious problem. The same is true for a lot of businesses but for the perspective of the national critical infrastructure? I doubt.